Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 123 to 107
- petsch6787
- Apr 22, 2017
- 18 min read
Other Pages in this list: Nos. 300-286 Nos. 285-271 Nos. 270-257 Nos. 256-241 Nos. 240-225 Nos. 224-209 Nos. 208-192 Nos. 191-175 Nos. 174-158 Nos. 157-141 Nos. 140-124 Nos. 106-91 Nos. 90-75 Nos. 74-59 Nos. 58-43 Nos. 42-27 Nos. 26-11 Nos. 10-01
Another Easter, come and gone. Where does the time go? It seems like just yesterday I was listening to the Bulls beat the Celtics in Game 1 of the playoffs. Oh wait, that was actually just a couple of days ago. But still, it was great. And then they beat them again in Game 2. That was great, too. Anyway, here comes the last list before we crack the Top 100. Let's do it!
123. Sufjan Stevens - Enjoy Your Rabbit
Year of Release: 2001
Illinois had already come out when my Freshman roommate Jim got me hooked on Sufjan Stevens, so in order to get caught up on his back catalog, I had some CD's to purchase. The summer after that year, I got my brother Cubs tickets as a present for his 8th Grade graduation. We took the train up there, and walked from LaSalle to Wrigley, but on that walk we stopped at a Borders which undoubtedly no longer exists and I picked up the first four Sufjan Stevens albums on CD. Later that day, Connor caught a batting practice home run off of Matt Murton. One of those CD's was Stevens's eccentric debut, two of those CD's were very similar stylistically to Illinois, and the other was Enjoy Your Rabbit, Stevens's second album and his first foray into long form instrumental electronic tracks. I feel like I am going to be saying this more and more frequently as we near the top of this summit, but the first time I listened to this album it made me have one of those "music can sound like this?" moments and that's because Enjoy Your Rabbit's first two tracks are composed of fuzzy glitches and beeps that, after a lengthy amount of time, form an overall soundscape that can be enjoyable, but at first listen can be perplexing (not to mention that this was not what I had been expecting from the soft spoken banjo man of Illinois). Each track on the album is named after a year of the Chinese Zodiac (Year of the Monkey, Year of the Rat, etc.) with the exception of the last track, Year of our Lord. This album is an experience, and I have never grown tired of it, from the DisneyWorld on acid of Year of the Rat to the slightly funky groove on Year of the Ox to the repetitive sing song synths of Year of the Rooster. Some of the tracks tend towards the more ambient side, but each one is interesting. This is one of the albums I used to rock a lot when I was mowing school yards that summer. Also, the thirteen minute penultimate track, Year of the Horse, seriously sounds like Mario Kart music, the song that plays in Rainbow Road on N64.
Song: Year of the Rooster
122. Kanye West - The College Dropout
Year of Release: 2004
They say you remember every detail about the first time you meet someone that you are going to fall in love with, and I know that's true because I remember a whole lot of details about the beginning of my relationship with Kanye. I first saw him while lying a on a pullout bed in my friend, Rick's apartment after watching Porky's, the video for Through the Wire came on, and we were both like "Hmm, I've never heard this song before, this Kanye West fellow, he's rapping with his mouth wired shut!". That summer I got the album because Jesus Walks was my jam, and later that year I crashed my Monte Carlo, while listening to Jesus Walks, and for the next seven years, I didn't drive in the city. Anyway, the reason this album is up here at 122 is that the second half contains a lot of chaff. There's too many skits, which aren't obnoxious or anything, they just take up too much playing time. But the songs that are great on this album (there are many) make up for the extra stuff. All Falls Down is a jam and also the first instance of Kanye's admitting to be self-conscious, something that set him apart from his peers at the time (rappers need to learn that when you step away from the over machismo side of things, everyone takes notice). My favorite tracks on this album are Get Em High and Breathe In Breathe Out, because they both have great beats and they make good use of guests Talib Kweli and Ludacris, respectively. This was the first (and superior, in my opinion) of Kanye's two albums that use mostly soul samples for the beats, before he started exploring synthesizers, but it still stands up with the rest of his catalog.
Song: Breathe In, Breathe Out
121. Justin Timberlake - The 20/20 Experience
Year of Release: 2013
When this album came out, the people who had problems with it usually complained that there were too many seven-minute pop song/interlude combinations. When this album came out, my main complaint was that the second half of the album contains two soul songs and one dance track that do not fit the mood of the rest of the album and that there should have been more seven-minute pop song/interlude combinations. But the first half of this album is so good that it makes up for the sogginess in the middle of the second half. If, GOD FORBID, something terrible happened to Justin Timberlake today, Jessica Biel could at least comfort herself knowing that anytime she wanted to feel his unmitigated love, all she would have to do is turn on this album. Pusher Love Girl compares her love to a drug that he can never kick. Strawberry Bubblegum compares her to the sweetest tasting candy. Tunnel Vision describes how she is the only person he can see in a crowded room. Mirrors describes how they are so perfect for each other that he sees himself through her as a filter. That Girl is just a straight-forward love song (although it is also part of that three track run that bores me). However, the best part of this album is all of the electronic interludes and breakdowns that each of the songs eventually evolves into. They turn a pretty good pop record into one of my favorite pop albums ever made. I pray to God that my neighbors cannot hear me singing when I listen to this album at home. Long live JT!
Song: Tunnel Vision (I forgot this video has naked boobs in it)
120. Pet Shop Boys - Very
Year of Release: 1993
My relationship with this Pet Shop Boys album is kind of nondescript in that I don't really have anything personal to say about it. I first listened to it because it was chronologically next in my list of Pet Shop Boys albums, and this was during a particularly nondescript time period of my life. Very is known among Pet Shop Boys circles (of which most of England falls into) as being the album that stepped away from the subdued synth-pop to fully instrumented dance pop songs, but really I just think it was an evolution from their sound on their prior albums. With the gift of hindsight, we know that Pet Shop Boys would move around the dance landscape numerous times in their career, but back in 1993, this was a bold step forward. Also, this is the first album in which Neil Tennant brazenly sings love songs to male pronouns, so the album is sometimes viewed as his coming-out album. Regardless of all that historical baggage though, this album has a lot of great songs on it. Not surprisingly, my favorite songs on this album sound similar to the style that Pet Shop Boys were moving away from; Dreaming of the Queen and To Speak Is A Sin are as sultry as any other synth tracks in their catalog. But I also appreciate the songs that are full on dance affairs: Young Offender (which sounds like a video game exploding with sound effects) and One and One Make Five. While this isn't my favorite Pet Shop Boys album (as it seems to be for a few people), it is still a gem in my eyes.
Song: Dreaming of the Queen
119. Panic! at the Disco - A Fever You Can't Sweat Out
Year of Release: 2005
This album was everywhere the summer after my Freshman year at Illinois. And every time someone would play me I Write Sins Not Tragedies, I would have the same reaction: this sounds like Fallout Boy with synthesizers. Then I went to a Cubs game with my friend Jeff, and when were coming back from it, he popped this album in, and I was like "You too, Jeff? They got you too?" but he played me the whole album and then I finally got it. I liked what I heard, and I understood why they were so popular, so let me share this with you; it's because Brandon Urie sings like he is singing a show tune, and teenagers for some reason love show tunes. It's easy to pick up Ryan Ross's lyrics with Urie singing this way, which made the album instantly catchy. So I got hooked like the rest of White America, and I saw them live twice before half the band left (Ross, the songwriter, was part of that half). Not to mention that the song titles are super long and quote random movies that people my age were totally into (Closer, Life Aquatic). Basically, it was a bunch of nineteen year olds singing to a bunch of nineteen year olds. But low and behold, I was nineteen at the time, so it fit nicely and also I can still belt out every single line to There's a Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered Honey, You Just Haven't Thought of It Yet at any time, at the drop of a hat. Challenge me! I'll do it!
Song: There's a Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered Honey, You Just Haven't Thought of It Yet
118. The Knife - Silent Shout
Year of Release: 2006
The Knife are a Swedish brother-sister electronic duo. Also, they are super fucking weird. Almost all pictures of and appearances by them feature them wearing masks, or old people make-up, or some other weirdness. And they were hella-popular in Sweden for the entirety of their existence, because Sweden is super weird (or maybe they are just more open then we are and can see through strangeness to the beauty lying beneath, perhaps the Swedes have it right and we are the weird ones). I listened to this album a whole bunch when I was living in the grad dorms for my last semester at Illinois. The Knife are the ultimate "grower" band, in that you need to listen to their albums many times before it starts to click, undoubtedly because the beats are so strange and their vocals are constantly manipulated. Both members' voices are low and mechanical on the opening title track, then Karin Dreijer Andersson's voice is almost untouched on the next track Neverland, then her voice is absurdly high pitched on Na Na Na. But the real draw here are the beats, they are freaking hypnotic! And they are extremely unique, Like a Pen's beat sounds like water drops falling on a swamp, the beat for Forest Families, while being soft, is urgent like alarms going off (matching the paranoid lyrical content of the song), and the beat for Silent Shout is a mix of a deep throb and a skittering upwards synth. The Knife gave us a genuinely unique album.
Song: Like A Pen
117. The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
Year of Release: 2006
The Decemberists can be extremely scholarly with the subject matter of their lyrics (they have an EP containing one eighteen minute track named after an Irish mythological epic). The Decemberists can also be extremely flowery and Americana-y (not a word, but I'm making it a word) with their musical content. On The Crane Wife, they find the perfect balance between those two. There are still tons of literary references, the second track (also my favorite track) on this album is a twelve-minute-long epic based on Shakespeare's The Tempest with the best blues guitar on it. And there's some Americana, Summersong is as shiny a song as The Decemberists have ever made. But the thing about this album is that I just listed my two favorite songs from The Crane Wife, and their sounds are from the two separate sides of their spectrum, and everything that's in between those sides is still great. The Perfect Crime #2 is a perfect indie rock song, led by the guitar line that maintains through the whole thing. I got into this album big time, right around the time I went to California last, and this album just always reminds me of the summer after that when I was down at school. Lots of sun, lots of love.
Song: The Island
116. Pet Shop Boys - Yes
Year of Release: 2009
It's no coincidence that this album ended up on the same section of the list as Very, they are pretty similar albums. In the sixteen years between the two albums, Pet Shop Boys explored Latin influences, they slowed it down with some acoustic stuff, they made a ballet, they made a Broadway show, they got semi-political on an album. But after all that, as if without an effort, they turn the switch back on and make an album that is just as good, and very similarly constructed as Very, actually I think it's slightly better. This album has all of the same musical background of Very. I find it very hard to describe this album after describing Very just a couple of entries ago, so let's focus on a couple of interesting specifics. This was the album that I was on in my PSB exploration when I first started at my current job (almost exactly two years ago!). Also, the second song on this album, All Around the World, uses a sample from the Nutcracker as the main beat, how much more Jeremy could that song possibly be? Finally, King of Rome is one of the most beautiful songs that Pet Shop Boys have ever created, with Neil Tennant starting each bridge "And if I were the King of Rome, I couldn't be more tragic" before the first chorus, "Oh baby come back, oh baby come back to me" and the last two choruses "Oh baby call me, baby call me today".
Song: King of Rome
115. Deftones - Deftones
Year of Release: 2003
At the end of each school year at my high school, there was a big assembly for anyone that was on honor roll all four quarters or who had perfect attendance, and they would draw out somewhere along the lines of a hundred different names and give those lucky students prizes that ranged from $100 Visa cards to t-shirts (I can't reiterate how much I loved my high school). My sophomore year, I won a twenty dollar Target card and I used it to buy this Deftones album. After White Pony blew up, it feels like the band found the need to make a couple of songs that they could try to get on the radio. The two singles, Hexagram and Minerva, are the first and third song on this album, but once you get past that little patch, the rest of the album is as interesting as the rest of their catalog. This album really set the table for how eclectic Saturday Night Wrist was going to be three years later. There still plenty of loud songs, but the slower songs are what evolved with this album, Deathblow has a desert wind synth drifting through the background and is my favorite track on the album, Lucky You is Deftones over a hip hop beat, and Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event is mostly played over a toy piano. This album is kind of a tweener, style-wise, but still a great one.
Song: Deathblow
114. The Beatles - Help!
Year of Release: 1965
Before we get into music talk here, I just want to say this: Help! is an awesome movie. If you haven't seen it, go check it out, it's really funny. Back to the music. Help! is the first album where we can see glimpses of the experimentation that The Beatles would start to fully explore from Rubber Soul on, but also retains the sound of the early album Beatles style. The version that I am referring to in this post is the British version, this is right around the height of the American Beatles discography just being ripped apart and songs randomly distributed throughout extra albums and all kinds of crap to make Capital Records more money, so the British version is the way to go. My favorite songs on this album are the throwback You're Going to Lose That Girl and the McCartney acoustic gem I've Just Seen A Face (this one totally because of how great the Across the Universe version is, its greatness helped highlight the greatness of the original for me). The only thing that holds this album back from being ranked among the greatest of The Beatles's discography is that there are too many songs on the second half of the album that I completely forget exist, too many throwaways, specifically It's Only Love, You Like Me Too Much, and Dizzy Miss Lizzy. These songs aren't bad or anything, just not rising up to the level that I know they could be. Still though, great album, great movie.
Song: I've Just Seen a Face
113. Perfume - Game
Year of Release: 2008
The first time I heard Japanese girl group, Perfume, it was in a place that I spend a lot of my free time, American Dad. In an episode where a future version of Stan comes to present time, he plays a song from the future and refers to it as Japanese Funk, I Shazamed the song (it was by Perfume), and downloaded the album before this, which was a little too squeaky, schoolgirl pop for me, but I liked enough of the songs to check out the next album, which was Game, and I am quite glad I did. Starting with Game, the Perfume albums are the creations of producer, Yasutaka Nakata, and then the ladies sing over whatever music he's created, and then after the vocals are laid down, he goes back in and plays with the track again. Also, in Japan, they release all of the singles first and after the run of singles is over, they release an album, so all of the versions of the singles on the albums are usually different, and in the case of Perfume, generally they are much more electro-dancey. As an English speaking person, I can't understand the 75% of the vocals on this album that are in Japanese anyway, but Nakata generally treats the ladies' vocals as additional instruments for him to play with, which is something I think egos prevent from happening more often in music in general. When the vocals don't have to always be the forefront, then you really have creative freedom. This freedom allows for the electronic vocal breakdown during the second half of Ceramic Girl and the simplicity of the repeated lyrics in Take Me Take Me. I don't want to take away from the group's pop styles, I think the pop songs on this album are much improved from the twee sounds on the prior album, so no hate there, but my most favorite mode for a Perfume song is dance mode, and Game features their first steps in that direction while balancing that new interest with a great slate of pop.
Song: Ceramic Girl
112. Warpaint - The Fool
Year of Release: 2010
My introduction to this band remains a mystery, one second I didn't know about them, the next I was listening to them on a pretty steady rotation as I was delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut. All three of Warpaint's albums have made appearances on this list, but their first full-length gets the highest spot for me. The two albums released after this one would explore the band's dance side more often, writing from the keyboard, but on this first album when they want to set down a dance beat, it's with guitar and bass. The bass in the second half of opener Set Your Arms Down churns steadily, giving you a beat to tap your foot to, while the lead guitar flutters around it. That's not to say that there aren't keys on this album; on Bees the keyboard sets up a beat at the beginning of the song and then they build upon it with bass, warbly guitar, and 80's drums, before the first bridge where the keyboard disappears altogether and the bass and guitar return to the forefront with the guitar whining down-key and the bass pumping the groove. I could do a breakdown of how the bass and guitar play off each other for every song on this album because they set the table for every song's success, but that would be boring to read. The Fool sounds like an album created in a smoky room, to be listened to in a smoky room.
Song: Bees
111. Toro Y Moi - Underneath the Pine
Year of Release: 2011
This is the album that started my obsession with chillwave when I first moved to the city to work at the zoo. Underneath the Pine was the album I turned on when I got home from work every day, that time when I was happy to be home, but still too lazy to peel off my work clothes and take a shower. But that was alright because Underneath the Pine sounds like it exists on a wave, so I would just let the music wash me for a little bit. This album took the lo-fi style from Causers of This and expanded on it, keeping the sunny disposition of that album but moving into a more psychedelic area. New Beat rides along on a super funky bass line, with soft keyboard chimes mixed in. I once again find myself at a loss of words when it comes to describing this album, it hits such a perfect note for me that I can't quite verbalize it, it's like a mix of the more psychedelic Beach Boys songs but only if they had a DJ that could cut stuff into those tracks but then there are also songs like Still Sound that are built squarely on a funky bass groove (lots of funk this week) and made for a multi colored dance floor. I really, really love this album, and if my computer hadn't died ten months after I downloaded this album, I would imagine that there would be numerous songs from it that were still in my top 25 played on iTunes. Every time I listen to it, it transports me back to that first year in Chicago.
Song: New Beat
110. Deerhunter - Cryptograms
Year of Release: 2007
I have said a couple of times that an album caused in me a reaction of "I didn't know music could sound like this" and that is true of this Deerhunter album, but not only had I never heard another album that had sounded like this at the time, I haven't heard another album that sounds like this since, including the many releases Deerhunter has put out. This album is a mix of ambient music with post-punk. Four of the seven tracks on the first side of the album are ambient, almost all of them feature running water of some sort, but they differentiate from each other with the secondary sounds; Intro features a Pink Floyd-esque creepy echoing keyboard note, White Ink features a rippling synth effect that sounds like a harp dipped in water, Providence features (I think) a modulated accordion, Red Ink mixes those water sounds with a synth effect that sounds like coming to a realization among a field of chimes. The post punk songs that are mixed in between these soundscapes have some similar synths integrated into the crunching bass and things get wound up and unleash a fury of sound before settling back down again. The second side of the album contains a handful of post-punk songs that are also amazing, but the mix of them with the weird ambient tracks is what really makes this album special for me.
Song: Lake Somerset
109. Live - Throwing Copper
Year of Release: 1994
The children of the Petschke household starting watching MTV pretty early in their lives. Live is my mother's favorite band, but even if that hadn't been the case, I would have known who they were simply from the amount of airplay that the videos for Lightning Crashes and I Alone got on that previously mentioned music television channel when I was but a youngin. But would have I known this album as intimately as I do if it had not been at an arm's length at all times when I was growing up? Probably not. Dare I say? Definitely not. The Dam at Otter Creek is one of my all-time favorite album openers. I like how loud this band was willing to get because it usually feels like a crescendo rather than a distraction. Also, I don't think that there are any bad songs on this album, just really a perfect alternative rock album. My favorite songs are Tbd (short for Tibetan Book of the Dead) and White, Discussion, both songs perfectly balancing moments of intense quiet and intense loudness, Tbd maintaining quiet for most of the song's length before an eruption at the end, while White, Discussion's brand of quiet is one of seething rage, hiding under the surface before explosions of sound in the choruses. Also, that song features a sample of Ross Perot. So...just really great all around.
Song: Tbd
108. Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine
Year of Release: 1989
Until I was in high school, the only version of this album that I had exposure to was a tape that my father had, with this album on one side and Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking on the other (I just wrote three words in a row with apostrophe s's, that's crazy!). And then in high school, I acquired some sort of CD version of this album, and I listened to it pretty regularly during the days of working at the movie theater. It was one of my frequent "walking down Plainfield Rd. home from work" albums. This is the album that got me into Nine Inch Nails, even though it's a lot more synth heavy than any of the albums that would follow. So in my mind, this album kind of sits apart from the rest of the Nine Inch Nails discography, not to diminish the hard rock that came later, I just enjoy this album the best. It's not like this entire album is flaccid or anything, there are still some hard moments, especially on Terrible Lie and Head Like a Hole, and even on the more subdued tracks, there is always a hint of the sinister behind everything Trent Reznor sings. After four albums making appearances on my list, I have run out of things to say about Nine Inch Nails.
Song: Sanctified
107. Pink Floyd - The Wall
Year of Release: 1979
I think that The Wall was the second Pink Floyd album that I really got into (after Animals; my Pink Floyd assimilation was kind of in a weird order), but before the time that I had listened to the full album all the way through, I had been exposed to so many songs on this album. Run Like Hell was one of the first batch of Napster songs that I downloaded (I also tried to get our eight grade class to adopt that song as our graduation song, turns out eight graders don't even get to pick a class song), metal band Mushroomhead covered Empty Spaces on an album that I had, and that's without even mentioning how many of these songs get played on classic radio on a daily basis. But I was still blown away the first time I heard this album and immediately loved the first disc. It took a little time before I came around to the second disc, it's a bit slower than the first and hits a small lull during Nobody Home and Vera, but as I got older, I grew to appreciate that second disc, as well. The whole thing is amazing, and anyone who talks shit about Roger Waters and how he was the lesser between him and David Gilmour, I think that this album is the ultimate argument killer. Nothing Gilmour ever did solo or with the Waters-less Pink Floyd was ever as good as The Wall, and The Wall came directly from the brain of Mr. Waters.
Song: The Thin Ice
Hot damn! We made it through another one! Next week, I'll break into the top 100 and making decisions about albums will get really dang hard. But alas, a problem for the next week version of me. See ya next time!
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